Winter Could Be Downright Nippy This Time Around

The Past Two Winters Were Wimpy, But This Year's Should Pack A Wallop, A Forecaster Said.

October 14, 1999|By Jerry Jackson of The Sentinel Staff

This winter should be considerably cooler than the past two because El Nino's warmth has finally faded, one of the nation's leading private weather forecasters said Wednesday.

Weather patterns this year more closely resemble those that coincided with crop-damaging freezes in December 1985-January 1986 and in December 1989, Jon Davis, chief meteorologist for Salomon Smith Barney Inc., told citrus industry leaders in Orlando.

When the weather gets cold enough to damage vegetables and burst the pulp inside citrus - 28 degrees or colder for four hours or more - water pipes can freeze and make life miserable for urban dwellers as well.

Davis said that although no one can predict a killer freeze, three of the moderate-to-severe freezes of the 1980s seem to have been spawned during periods when El Nino had yielded to its meteorological opposite - La Nina - just as now.

``It's a little unnerving,'' Davis said. ``Nothing points to a warm winter this year, particularly early in the winter.''

Davis conceded that he blew last year's forecast, when he predicted that folks as far south as Orlando would be tossing logs into the fireplace by December. It turned out to be one of the warmest winters on record, the second consecutive such winter.

What happened, Davis said, is that the complex global weather phenomenon known as El Nino - the inexplicable warming of a vast stretch of the Pacific Ocean west of Peru - was so strong that its warmth lingered longer than expected after its peak in 1997.

But now the La Nina pattern - cooler-than-normal Pacific waters - has been in place for more than a year.

That's long enough, Davis said, to allow cooler air to begin piling up, meteorologically speaking, in parts of Canada and much of the Northern Hemisphere.

While not bitterly cold, the cooler air already has seeped south into the Rockies a few times this fall, and it also has caused people in Chicago, where Davis works, to bundle up.

``There's a lot more cold air around already,'' Davis said. ``The effects of El Nino are finally gone.''

Davis, whose clients include major oil and gas companies and agribusiness giants such as Cargill Inc., said there's usually no better than a three-out-of-10 chance that a crop-damaging freeze will make it into Central Florida.

Even though La Nina is boosting the prospects for colder weather, Davis said, the odds of a freeze still are no greater than a coin-toss, about 50-50, this winter.

Davis said there is one wild card that could lower the chances of a chilly winter: global warming.

A growing number of scientists suspect that a buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere is creating a man-made greenhouse effect, trapping heat and altering weather worldwide with potentially dire consequences. Hurricanes, for example, might be more powerful if they are fueled by abnormally warmer seas.

Davis said he has not become a big believer in global warming, but he's prepared to join the amen chorus if the next four or five months are anything like the past two winters.